Our first official week of homeschool went just as expected—a little touch and go as my son and I both got used to the new schedule and rhythm. He was having a hard time transitioning to mom being full time teacher and I was having a hard time figuring out where I needed to have patience and where I needed to give him a little push. Needless to say, the first week was not all sunshine and roses. There were a few tears, lots of prayers and afternoons where we were both plum exhausted.
Our community day for Classical Conversations falls on a Tuesday, so thankfully we get introduced to the memory work early on and have the rest of the week to review. With this schedule, it was important for me to find fun interactive activities that incorporate the memory work so we had plenty of opportunities to explore. While we did not get to everything that I planned, I wanted to include some of the ideas in here so that other parent’s could get some ideas as well!
Side note: we are using The Good and The Beautiful Cirriculum for Language Arts Level K and Math Level K that we do 1 lesson from each day. It is a beautiful cirriculum that utilizes spiral learning and we have loved it so far.
History Activities
This week in history we memorized the first 5 Commandments. In addition to practicing the song throughout the week, we also completed some fun activities about Moses and the commandments. After our community day we discussed who Moses was and read from the Bible while coloring our 10 Commandments coloring sheets found on CC connected. I also found a really cute YouTube series that had kid friendly stories that made the 10 Commandments more relatable to young audiences. There were 5 episodes so we watched 1 per day. You can find the video series here or search for Kids 10 Commandments by Bible Stories.
In art we learned about the five elements of shape or OiLS, so in our art journal we worked on drawing the stones and discussed which elements of shape we had to use to draw the picture. This was a fun activity that probably took less than 10 minutes.
We did not get to my last history activity: discuss or journal about your ideal Sabbath and what it means to “keep it holy”. Looking back, this easily could have been a dinner time discussion with the whole family so I wanted to keep it in my idea vault.
Science
The science memorization was about the classification of living things: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. We listened to a fun song you can find here that we used to memorize the order of everything. I found some adorable coloring sheets on CC Connected that included handwriting practice as well (pictured below).
While I know the goal for younger kids is just to memorize the facts, I wanted to make sure my kindergartener understood what a living thing is. We headed outside and had a short discussion about the needs of living things (shelter, food, air, reproduction etc) before we moved on.
Other ideas for science:
Living vs Nonliving 3 part cards
For our community day experiment, we learned about seed germination. We were given a ziplock bag and beans to grow our own sprouts in the window. Everyday we would check on our beans and draw what was happening in our school journal!
Art
In art, our lesson was about Oils or circles, dots, angles lines and curved lines (the elements of shape). I divided our art paper in 4 boxes and had Drew draw a picture using only circles in one box, dots in another etc.
One day, we headed out to our tree house where we completed our lessons for that day. I asked him to look around in nature and identify the various shape patterns he saw. He then drew different elements in his nature journal. For example, trees were obviously made of straight and angled lines, whereas pinecones looked like a bunch of dots. This got us outside and got our creativity flowing!
Geography
Aside from practicing our Fertile Crescent song, we used our dry erase pockets to practice locating and coloring the points throughout the week. At the end of the week, we played pass the globe (just bouncing a dollar store blow up globe around) and had to locate the Fertile Crescent when I said stop. Much like a game of hot potato! This was a huge hit for my boy!
Math
Even though we have our daily math lessons in our The Good and the Beautiful book, we were memorizing skip counting by twos. Since we already had workbook math I wanted to make sure this was just for fun learning so I drew a skip counting maze with chalk on the sidewalk.
And that was the bulk of our first week of homeschool! Our day would start around 9:30 after dropping off the littles at their preschool and would end when it was time to pick them up around 1pm. This week we were able to do an activity from each subject every day, though I’m sure as time goes on we will have more science heavy days and more history heavy days—implementing more of a loop schedule than just doing a little each day.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on other fun activities that you can think of to compliment CC Cycle 1 Week 1, especially if your kids are older! Comment below with activities, books or lessons that you have loved!
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